In an earlier post, I shared a sneak peek of our book, Interpreting Christmas at Museums and Historic Sites. Next week, Ken and I will provide a comprehensive overview during the upcoming AASLH webinar, “Jingle All the Way: Maximizing Your Museum’s Holiday Potential.” This webinar draws from the book but is not an hour-long sales pitch. Instead, we’ll share key advice and ideas on leveraging holiday celebrations, researching the local history of Christmas, planning and hosting holiday events, expanding traditional programs, and enhancing cultural sensitivity and inclusivity. With so much to cover, we’ll be hitting the highlights. If you’re seeking inspiration for Christmas during these hot summer days, join us on July 23, 2024 at 3:00 pm Eastern. For more details and to register, visit here. Plus, you’ll receive a 30% discount code for the book upon registration.

With proofs in hand, the book is moving closer to reality with a publishing date in fall, but more likely later than earlier. It has 21 chapters, 40 images, and an extensive bibliography of nearly 175 books and articles packed into 270 pages, which is about 25% longer than my Interpreting African American History and Culture at Museums and Historic Sites that Rowman & Littlefield published ten years ago (btw, Rowman was recently acquired by Bloomsbury Publishing). It’s now available for pre-order at Rowman.com for $50 for paperback and a jaw-dropping $125 for hardcover (I don’t set the prices but a 30% discount code is available for webinar attendees).

Behind the Scenes of Indexing

Ken Turino, Sara Bhatia, and I spent nearly two months creating he index, despite the publisher allocating just two weeks. The delay was partly due to other commitments (I was closing out the semester and attending the Newport Summer School), but also because the scope of the book made it significantly more complex. As anticipated, there’s an abundance of content on gifts, trees, lights, ornaments, decorating, and a variety of Santas. Rather than list two dozen pages that mention “lights,” we added subheadings for candles and electric lights, as well as safety considerations, and included “see also” references to help readers find specific information more quickly. But geez, that was slow going.

We experimented with GPT to produce the index, and the results were mixed. While GPT can generate an initial index with proper nouns and some concepts correctly formatted with page numbers, about half of the entries are usually either missing or incorrect (see example above). Thus, manual review of the proofs is still necessary, but at least GPT provides a head start. If you are interested in learning more in using GPT for indexing, I’m happy to share what I learned.

The index eventually grew to 22 pages, which is longer than most chapters! Indexing required a meticulous review of every page, during which we discovered errors that had slipped past four proofreaders. Ugh. Should we consider these flaws a characteristic of an artisanal, handcrafted gift to the field?